ZIM Day 45

He opened the door. We stepped into a small enclosure on the roof. It was pouring now, but we were dry inside. Osiris looked at me and started to talk.

“This is it; this is where he’s been since it all started. He’s been waiting. He figured out how to make it all work for them. He created this, but it didn’t go exactly as planned. He created a new type of nanotechnology that could make the average person stronger, faster, and smarter. The problem was that it didn’t work right.

They were expecting to be able to create soldiers that could be controlled as one. There wouldn’t be a question of judgment anymore. Someone could sit back from a safe, comfortable desk and control everything. To the government, this seemed like a great idea. They could actually take the individual out of the battle. There would never be confusion again; no more wasted time on communications. One person could control it all.

They realized that the great soldiers of our time weren’t the men on the battlefield. The men on the ground weren’t effective. They couldn’t see the big picture. They could win the battle, but not the war. They decided that the best soldiers were the ones sitting behind computers. In a world of video games and computer nerds it wasn’t very surprising. They saw this as an opportunity. The great military leaders weren’t war torn veterans anymore; they were guys who spent all day behind a monitor.

They were working to make this happen, but he didn’t see it the same way. He made sure it wouldn’t work. They tested it over and over again. They put the machines into men and women and tried to make it work. The soldiers couldn’t be controlled; it didn’t even have any effect on them. They were still normal. The higher ups were infuriated. They couldn’t understand why it didn’t work.

He was fired and I was told to continue my work. I didn’t know why. I wasn’t even working on the same project. My job was to figure out how to transmit the machines through the air. They had realized long before that the best way to use this wasn’t to put them into our own soldiers. The idea was to get them into the enemy and control them. There would never be a need for US troops to enter another country again. We could just use their own people against them.
They executed the test subjects after he was fired. The next morning, they found the base overrun. He had built the machines only to work after the living person died. The problem was that no one could control them. They lost all reasoning ability after death and became the monsters you see outside. He did, however, come up with a way to control them.”

“How do you know all of this? I thought you weren’t sure what happened. How the hell did it get out? Why is everybody dead?”

I didn’t know what to think. Nothing made sense anymore. I looked and saw someone standing in front of me in the shadows. Then I felt the cold steel of a hand gun press into my neck.

Osiris said, “Because I was the one who released it.”

Then a voice came from the man standing in front of me, “And I’m the one who started it all.”

He stepped out of the shadows. I gasped. Except for the rotting flesh hanging off of his bones, he looked exactly like me.